To be entirely honest with y'all, I haven't carefully read all of this article. But I already have my opinion ready! The fact that MapReduce is a step back, in

To be entirely honest with y'all, I haven't carefully read all of this article. But I already have my opinion ready! The fact that MapReduce is a step back, in a sense, is true. But it's a step back from a dead-end alleyway, a step away from a particular very complex and bloated programming model--to wit the SQL-based RDMS--that is good as far as it goes, but requires so much effort to implement that it is unlikely to be a great model to use as the basis for innovative implementations. If you're going to do crazy shit of the sort that google does, massively distributed computations on very high volumes of data, then in order to do it well you have to keep it simple. Such is life. There are plenty of RDMSes that can do the full whammy of RDMS features, but try to take, say, one that does not allow for replication and then implement replication. See you next decade. Sometimes taking a step back can help put things into perspective, is all I'm saying.